


Five times Jack had a pregnancy scare that turned out to be a false alarm, and one time it wasn't

by Arnica



Category: Torchwood
Genre: 5 Times, Comment Fic, Mpreg, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-30
Updated: 2013-05-30
Packaged: 2017-12-13 11:04:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/823585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arnica/pseuds/Arnica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: For The Matrix Refugee's prompt on LJ's comment_fic community. "Torchwood, Jack/any, Five times Jack had a pregnancy scare that turned out to be a false alarm, and one time it wasn't." I tell you what, I wrote this in like three hours. It was nice to write something easily again. I'm so sick of fighting with my words. I don't do mpreg since I had such a horrid time with my own pregnancy and labor that I walked away from it with a new occasional-traumatic-flashback-worthy set of body horror squicks, but I just had this really clear mental image of this kid I briefly knew in my very early twenties and the victory strut he did on the picnic table the day he found out his girlfriend wasn't pregnant mixed with my own victory celebration the first time I dodged a bullet. It was so good I just kind of fell in love with this mental image of Jack being just so happy he's not pregnant every time he thinks he got tagged.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five times Jack had a pregnancy scare that turned out to be a false alarm, and one time it wasn't

  
  


  
**1)**  He wakes up all at once, in a sudden cold sweat and cuts his eyes to the left. His partner is sprawled wide across the bed, face down in the pillows, and he's glad they're on a nice motion absorbing gel sponge as he slips off the mat as carefully as he can and sneaks into the bathroom. The walls dim from their normal neutral eggshell light and he rolls his eyes as waves of purple tinged grey sweep across the curved walls like billowing thunderheads, blue and yellow bolts of anxiety flashing on and off. He curses the psychic wallpaper and himself for drama queens as he balances his weight awkwardly between the slick rolled rim of the wash basin and the sunning rock, hopping for the support branch that makes up the main beam of the ceiling. He hangs by one hand, feeling blindly in the crook of the branch for what he's got hidden there and takes a moment to idly wonder how he'd explain himself if his partner wandered in the door right now. The other man doesn't of course, but he amuses himself for the endless three minutes these stupid hormone based tests take. He hangs from the branch with the indicator tucked firmly under his tongue and does chin pulls while trying to come up with as many ridiculous but still plausible reasons to be hanging from a branch at sunsrise as he can come up with. He's come up with eleven by the time his wrist strap buzzes and he doesn't bother getting down first; just pulls himself up high enough to snag the end of the stick between his fingers and spits it out. 

It isn't mauve.

"Yeeees!" He's screaming in triumph at the top of his lungs, dropping to his feet and spiking the blessed negative pregnancy test into the bin as hard as he can. The door slams into the wall as he kicks it as hard as he can just to watch his partner come off the bed and across the room in a flash of perfect pale skin and deadly grace, bare blade in hand and long line of muscles alert even as sleep stupid eyes keep scanning the empty room.

"What the ever luvin fuck?!"

"I'm not fucking pregnant!" He leaps onto the bed and proceeds to strut up and down it's length in the cockiest victory dance he can cobble together on short notice.

"Good, because if you were planning on pinning one on me I was going to kick your teeth in."

"Ha, you couldn't pay me to whelp your parasite." He throws himself down across he bed, digging under it and pulling out a half empty bottle of hypervodka and taking a long victory swallow straight from the neck. "This tastes extra good right now. You don't even understand, like it's made of fucking rainbows or something." He wipes his mouth with his bare arm and then licks the drops of liquor off his own arm, smirking up at his partner. "Come here, get me not pregnant again."

"Break it up you two." They both whip around, weapons drawn from hiding holes scattered around the room. On the screen laid into the wall the Time Agents are staring down at themselves. "Save the party for later, because you're currently trapped in a time loop. If you're watching this, then this is the five hundredth and thirty-seventh day you've done this."

**2)**  He's been trying to avoid this conversation. He might be traveling with these people for a while, but he doesn't know them, not really, and it's none of their business anyway. He doesn't need much, any half decent merchant anywhere that caters to any sort of human clientele across seventeen galaxies in a five thousand year time span will have something he can actually use. 

Apparently that's too specific a set of parameters, because so far they've yet to land at a single place Jack can duck around the corner and hit a convenient auto-clinic. Hell, the only pregnancy test he's seen in the week he's been looking for one has been so prehistoric it only detects one sex specific hormone and only from the mother. He'd stood there holding it in the aisle of the tiny store biting back a bitter laugh until Rose ran up on him, little red plastic basket dangling from her hand. She'd laughed long and loud, plucking it from his hand and tossing it carelessly in a wire bucket at the end of the aisle.

"Thanks but no. Jackie Tyler's brown eyed girl is a bit smarter than that. Unless you're worried  _you're_  pregnant!" And that had been that. They'd paid for the armful of girly little bits she'd apparently needed badly enough to come all the way back to pre-contact Earth for and then the three of them were off again, ricocheting around the universe and not stopping anywhere Jack can take five minutes to himself to make sure he's not actually up the duff with some dirt-born, long dead soldier's kid.

"Stop pacing around my console room." He stumbles over his own feet and tries not to look guilty as he glances up at the Time Lord leaning against the railing. "Third corridor, fourth door on the right, tall cupboard closest to the door, second shelf. I _could_  just tell you you're just having a bit of vortex sickness but you're not going to believe me until you check for yourself." The Doctor grins widely down at him. "You don't think I would have let you chase Slitheen through Cardiff in a delicate condition, do you?"

"I think the better question is, would I have let you stop me?" He grins up at the alien who laughs back.

"That's me told. Good for you. You're not up the duff this time lad, now be smart about it and grab a six month dose of birth control off the third shelf when you're done. Spare me the pacing of next time, yeah?"

**3)**  He's trapped in the fucking dark ages. Things are dirty, barbaric, unsanitary and he's trapped on a dirt ball with superstitious primitives in a time when people actually _die_  from having babies, of all the easily preventable things. He's stuck like a bee in amber, trapped and not dying in a world he doesn't quite understand and he might be pregnant all because he let himself spend the last five years in a drunken bitter rage and not once did he stop to consider that his birth control might not last as long as he would until he started vomiting two weeks ago.

A week later he's so grateful when his girlfriend admits to his dying body that she's been poisoning him that when he wakes up he just unrolls himself from the carpet and walks away while she's busy trying to dig a far too shallow grave entirely too close to the road.   
 **  
4)**  Apparently a weekend of just the two of them entertaining a stranded human prince from the seventh great and bountiful empire while they waited out the three day buffer zone Jack insists on whenever he passes a message down into the future was a bad idea. He and Lucia sit side by side on the edge of the tub, fingers tangled together as they stare at two cups side by side on the counter.

"This is the weirdest pregnancy test I've ever taken." She mutters, glaring at the cup directly opposite her. Between the cups the sand in the egg timer seems to be doing its best to run back up into the hourglass.

"Yeah, well this is the least weird test I've ever taken so I suppose it all balances out." Her elbow catches him high but gently in the gut as he laughs. "Stop! You're the one who gets off watching me with other men. This is at least...seven percent your fault." The last of the grains falls to the bottom and they both rush for the edge of the sink, plucking two ever so slightly altered pregnancy tests out of two separate wax paper cups. The white wick from his has been run into a hastily cobbled together box full of reactants and all he has to do is tug it out of there. Mauve for yes and blue for no. He shuts his eyes tightly, reminds himself that if worse comes to worse he has a really good medic on their team, and yanks the strip out into the air before peeking slowly. "Yes!" He raps his knuckles against the stucco ceiling, scraping away the skin as he pumps his fists in victory. "I'm not pregnant, again!"

"I am."

_5)_  "Yeees! Not pregnant. AGAIN!" He rips the backup strip from under his tongue, blue as well but best to have backup when he's trying to recreate a proper test strip with access to almost the right chemicals for the first time since he landed. He kicks the bathroom door open in triumph and starts a victory strut across Ianto's hardwood floors only to come up short when he locks eyes on Ianto in the doorway. The grocery bag is slumped over on the ground where it's fallen from nerveless fingers and Ianto blinks one long extra slow blink before clearing his throat.

"Sorry, I think I have heat stroke from walking to the shop on the only sunny day in two weeks. You did just say you're  _not_ pregnant; as in you thought you might actually have been?"

"Hey, I've warned _everyone_  I've ever been with."

"Yes but we don't believe you!" He steps in from the front step and kicks the door shut without noticing that he's left the groceries on the front stoop. "But you said _not_ , right?" He looms into Jack's space, grinning as he presses Jack's body against the wall with his own. "That sentence never gets any less sexy every time I hear it." He chuckles under his breath, leaning in and nipping at Jack's mouth. "Say it again."

"I'm not pregnant." He slides his hands down the slope of the Welshman's back and down into the basketball shorts hanging off the Ianto's hips to cup the fullest curves of his ass. "Never gets any less sexy, huh? Is this a common occurrence for you, Ianto Jones?"

"Says the man who added the word 'again' to the sentence I'm not pregnant."

"Shut up."

 

**6)**  "I fucking hate you right now, you know that right?" Somewhere there's a calm part of his brain where he knows that he probably shouldn't be screaming at Jack when the man's obviously as frightened as Ianto is, probably more so since Ianto doesn't have a huge fucking shard of glass embedded halfway through his neck, but he doesn't care. Jack, terrible as it is to say, is not the unlucky one today because Jack is two heartbeats, three at the most, from death. Ianto however is going to be the one left behind with the corpse of a heavily pregnant Jack and more than half an hour between himself and the UNIT Rescue and Response team on their way. There's a med kit back in the SUV, but it's half a mile down the road, flipped over on its side and all Ianto has is his pocket knife. He keeps it sharp, but he keeps it 'cutting rope and stabbing badguys sharp' he has never in his life honed it 'surgery sharp' and he's whimpering in his throat as he looks down at it wrapped in his bloodless fist.

'know.' Jack mouths the word at him and then tries to smile with lips gone blue.

"I _can't_  Jack. I don't know what I'm doing, I could hurt her." Jack doesn't have to tell Ianto that there isn't a choice, that their little girl isn't going to last long trapped inside a dead body and the looming nameless specter that's haunted the entire pregnancy sits in the forefront of both their brains, visible for the first time as they allow themselves to fully feel the fear of what happens to Jack  _and_  their daughter if his body tries to reset with her there.

'try.'

And because Jack Harkness is a bastard, that is his last word. He literally uses his last breath to ask Ianto to save their girl, because he's a dick. Ianto lets himself shut his eyes and look away from the smoldering corpse of the monstrously large alien thing right on top of Jack's stupid little veg garden, the ruin of their front wall, and the simultaneously entrancing and frightening flop of his daughter rolling over through the thin skin of Jack's stomach. Ianto closes his eyes, breathes deeply and flicks his wrist, flipping the butterfly blade open.

"Okay, Owen, I don't believe in God but mate, you never once failed to come through for us when you were here. If there's _any_  part of you anywhere right now, don't let me hurt this baby. Be with me man, because I'm on my own right now."

It is easily the worst thing he has ever done in his life. He has to force himself to focus on what he's doing, to actually  _see_ every bloody inch and cut as he tries to not think about the huge I shaped cut he's making one shallow inch at a time in fear of a sudden kick or roll. For a moment, he can imagine exactly the face Owen would be making right now and the awful jokes he'd make about giant Frankenstein scars if he were here. He takes a breath, focuses on that thought and slits the thin rubbery surface under his fingers with a quick flick of his wrist, shoving both hands in as far as he can to keep the backs of his fingers between the blade and the rapidly deflating sac he's trying to cut her free from. She coughs, a wet sucking gag that scares him. The blade slices across the back of his fingers and he doesn't feel it. He wrestles his daughter free from a space that's already trying to heal itself and cuts a strip of Jack's braces to tie as tightly as he can around the cord with because he's pretty sure he read somewhere you have to tie it before cutting it.

"I know I told him he could name you because he was doing all the hard work, but all he did was lie there.  _I'm_  going to name you."

He hasn't actually gotten around to naming her by the time Jack staggers into the room weak kneed on the arm of a short round woman with a stern scowl on her face who plants them side by side on the edge of the bed and examines the three of them.

"Still hate me?"

"A little. Kinda hard to hate you when she's looking at me though." He takes a deep breath. "I'm  _so_  glad Owen is actually dead right now because in a fit of panic I prayed to him and if he were here I'd never live it down." Jack chuckles in his ear, nuzzling the bolt of Ianto's jaw.

"You are easily the best partner I've ever had."

"You're damn right I am." In his arms his daughter's eyes aren't the cloudy baby blue he remembers his nephew's being. They're clear and dark as she stares seriously up at them both as if trying to decide if she actually knows them, and if so from where. "I'm naming her Thetis."

"That's because you're traumatized.  _Don't_  fill out that birth certificate!" Jack points a finger at the UNIT doctor and her pen in hand. "He'll change his mind."

He doesn't change his mind.


End file.
